The review package that was sent to us was fairly frill-less, mostly made up of card cover and thick paper casing. The Mobi itself is the same dimensions as any standard SD Card, though its bright orange coloring helps it stand apart. The review unit is the 8GB flavor; it comes in other sizes as well.

Using it is as simple as finding a compatible device with an SD card slot; the obvious choice is a digital camera. Now, the way it works is that the hardware interfaces with the companion Eye-Fi Android app (which has to be linked to the hardware via activation code). The hardware creates a wi-fi network with the built-in chip, and sends images and such saved to it to the app on the mobile device.

On paper, the Mobi still provides exceptional value to the multitudes of people who have digital cameras with SD card slots; where this piece comes up big is its ability to be used in other case scenarios.

While doing a couple of hardware reviews, I had a couple of devices that called for SD cards. One was the Visioneer Mobility Cordless Scanner, a device that looks to allow busy folks scan important documents on the go. The folks at Visioneer are well aware of the Mobi’s functionality, and suggest its usage with the Mobility Scanner. I popped the Mobi into the scanner’s SD card slot, and it opened up a whole new world of usage; scanned images were transferred to my smartphone via the companion app, and were then auto-uploaded to Dropbox (which is a setting I have for incoming images). It makes for a pretty seamless solution, and increases the efficacy of the scanner.

On a whim, I decided to pair it with the SwannEye IP Camera, a wi-fi connected camera with an SD Slot to record motion. Again, the Mobi bridged the resulting clips to my smartphone, which then moved them on to Dropbox. In both these cases, the Mobi was instrumental in getting the images and video uploaded to the cloud. Via the app, it’s possible to share directly to some social networks and cloud banks.

The Mobi handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. When connected to a laptop, it can be read like a regular external storage source, and manipulated thus.

Now, I would have liked an auto-delete option, which would prevent having to connect it to a computer or sync with smartdevice to delete data.

In any case, the Eye-Fi might not be a new concept, but it feels like a solid investment. With other services (Eye-Fi Cloud, for instance) it can become close to indispensable.